- Abandon your first draft long enough to rediscover it for your second.
I was ecstatic to finish my first draft. But secretly, I was also overwhelmed and demoralized. I’d spent several years in the depths of plot and character, outlining and organizing until I reached the draft’s end. Finalizing the first draft only made me see how many years of writing and editing I needed before anyone could read the damn thing. For two years, I’d spent nearly every morning in the world of my novel. Now, I knew the expert advice was to take a break. But I didn’t want to take a break. I wanted to know when the story would be done. So I thought I’d cheat a bit on the advice to let the first draft rest. Immediately after finishing my draft, I started doing worldbuilding research. I worked on a novella featuring a minor character from the main novel. After a couple restless months, I relented. I printed out the first draft and re-read it. I knew it was too soon, I hadn’t stopped living in the world of the novel for a moment, but my internal timeline overran my better creative judgment. My research had also led me down a couple rabbit holes. What if I re-made the entire magic system based on this book about the sensory abilities of plants? What if I changed the names of all my characters? Overwhelmed with the imaginative possibilities, I forced out a couple poorly written and irrationally re-imagined chapters. Then, luckily, life intervened. I got a divorce and developed a chronic illness and abruptly stopped working on the novel revision. Instead, I wrote poetry about the ocean and rage-journaled and cried on the floor of my new apartment, surrounded by candles. I started a new story about a breakup. I forgot about the original novel, so much that I couldn’t describe the plot if I tried. Then, almost two years after I stopped my lackluster revision, I woke up re-writing the novel’s ending scene in my head. I thought about the scene while brushing my teeth that morning, and my heartbeat sped up like how it used to speed up when I lived in the world of the novel. From the back of my closet, I took down the dusty three-ring binder that held my first draft. Recognizing the absurdity of my original attempts at revision, I re-read the draft like it was new, and the vision of where my second draft needed to go materialized. It was only in forgetting what the novel was about that I was able to rediscover the magic of the story. I don’t know what clunky, wooden thing I would have produced if I’d continued to force the re-write before the novel was ready, but I’m so grateful that circumstances forced me to give the first draft proper space to rest.
- Don’t do it alone. Find some expert advice that speaks to you.
From my first deficient attempt at revision, I knew I needed help in tackling my second draft. After I re-read the first draft, my revision notes were a messy list of bullet points–everything from notes on the weather to questions about whether a main character’s magical abilities should be cut. But I had no idea how to use my dozens of unorganized points to force a more cohesive story. Enter Matt Bell and his handy little yellow book on revision, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. I was introduced to Matt Bell’s book during a writing course. It was not the first resource I ran across about revision, but it was the first one that stuck. Bell’s straightforward method spoke to me; it gave me much needed structure on how to tackle revision. I’ll highlight a couple of the most useful things I learned from Refuse to Be Done below, but just the presence of this thin yellow volume on my desk, now dog-eared and underlined, was sometimes all I needed to keep going. It made me feel as though I wasn’t alone in wading through the mire of my rewrite. That doesn’t mean I’ve adopted all of Bell’s advice wholesale. Most notably, I am not going to manage to write my novel in three drafts, though in a nod to Bell’s method I have lovingly labeled my next draft “Draft 2.5,” since I know I’ll need at least one more round of plot re-writes before entering the final edit. While I highly recommend checking out Matt Bell’s book, I think it’s more important to find the resource that matches your particular style. I was lucky to run across Refuse to be Done at precisely the right time, but there are loads of other books out there on revision that could fit your needs.
- Throw away copy + paste in favor of rewriting.
This is Matt Bell’s main piece of advice for getting to a solid second draft: he urges writers to retype everything. You can have your first draft up on a second or split screen, but rather than revising in your first draft or copy and pasting chunks of text, Bell insists you retype every word into a second draft. When we discussed this method in my writing course, the reaction from my fellow students was one of incredulity. Re-type…everything? Our instructor reminded us that Matt Bell is a full time writer, so there is a level of privilege to making this suggestion. No one in our course was writing full time; we were all writing in the dawn and dusk hours around our paying jobs. For me, the decision to rewrite, rather than revise, was a freeing one. I’ve never been good at revision. Staring at my already written prose makes my eyes fuzz and my mind wander. A blank page gives me energy, and Bell’s technique allowed me to capture the energy and excitement of the first draft and channel it into the second. So for this draft, I truly did re-type every word, usually with my first draft open on a split screen to pull from. I am also an overly verbose writer, and the act of re-typing made this draft clearer and more concise. As Bell points out, when you have to manually re-type every word, you’re unlikely to move over an awkward description or a boring piece of dialogue. There were some chapters that went quite quickly because I wasn’t changing much. And by the end, there were some chapters where I didn’t even open my first draft. I was deep enough into the flow and tone of my second that I didn’t need to consult the first.
- Keep writing until your story “stands on its own hooves and turns around to glower.” (Robert Boswell, as quoted in Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done)
About two thirds through my second draft, a magical moment happened. I don’t know how it happened or why it happened then. But one morning I had the distinct feeling that my novel had stepped into its own shoes. It came of age, so to speak, and discovered who it was and what it was saying. It was as if my writing finally fell into a stream I didn’t realize I’d been only sitting on the banks of. It took several years and tens of thousands of words, but eventually my story found itself just through the sheer act of writing it. I don’t know if this would have happened if I had been revising instead of rewriting. Perhaps for authors who have written several novels already, this moment comes sooner. But for my novel, it took one and two thirds drafts before it solidified into something real. Something outside of myself. That feeling was surprising and indescribable. It is not something I could have manifested by force, it only came because of every word I’d written prior.
- Allow yourself to find pleasure in writing your novel on days like today.
I wrote my second draft on days when I had headaches. Many, many headaches. Since I have a headache most days, most of my writing was done with one. I also wrote on days when I felt a little nauseous, or had vertigo, or worried about my work to do list; days when typing words felt like squeezing water out of mud. It came out drop by drop, sentence by sentence. I knew if I waited until I felt better, I’d never write at all. The novel will be written on days like today became my mantra, something I said to myself every morning when I sat down with ginger tea and the fear that I was too unwell to ever finish. This does not mean I forced myself to write everyday as a punishment aimed at defeating my chronically ill body. If I punished myself by writing, I’d also never write at all. Instead, I treated writing like my frequent, and sometimes difficult, walks. I go for walks because my doctors and physical therapists have told me to. But mostly I go because I love them, even the days it takes me several hours to manage to put shoes on and get out the door. Once I’m finally outside, I love seeing the change in my neighbor’s dahlia garden and looking for whether the Cascades are visible through the cloud cover. And once I’m finally in the novel, I love the surprising, introspective pauses my characters take when I’m writing them while in pain. I love losing myself in the writing for just long enough to forget it was hard to begin. There were many days in the course of writing my second draft where I could only walk two blocks and only write two hundred words. If I could let go of word count goals and self-imposed deadlines, it became wonderful to write those two hundred words. I could be grateful for the short amount of time I got to spend with the novel, even if it was a half an hour. I didn’t have to wait for the perfect day to write, I could write today.
KT Reed Writes 